Category: Networking

VMware Cloud Director as a cloud management solution is built on top of the underlying compute and networking platforms that virtualize the physical infrastructure. For the compute and storage part VMware vSphere was always used. However, the networking platform is more interesting. It all started with vShield Edge which was later rebranded to vCloud Networking and Security, Cisco Nexus 1000V was briefly an option, but currently NSX for vSphere (NSX-V) and NSX-T Data Center are supported.

VMware has announced the sunsetting of NSX-V (current end of general support is planned for (January 2022) and is fully committed going forward to the NSX-T Data Center flavor. The two NSX releases while similar are completely different products and there is no direct upgrade path from one to the other. So it is natural that all existing NSX-V users are asking how to migrate their environments to the NSX-T?

NSX-T Data Center Migration Coordinator has been available for some time but the way it works is quite destructive for Cloud Director and cannot be used in such environments.

In other words, it is not in-place migration. The provider will need to stand up new NSX-T backed cluster(s) next to the NSX-V backed ones in the same vCenter Server. Also the current NSX-T feature set in Cloud Director is not equivalent to the NSX-V. Therefore there are networking features that cannot in principle be migrated. To see comparison of the NSX-V and NSX-T Cloud Director feature set see the table at the end of this blog post.

The service provider will thus need to evaluate what Org VDCs can be migrated today based on existing limitations and functionality. Start with the simple Org VDCs and as new releases are provided migrate the rest.

How does the tool work?

It is Python based CLI tool that is installed and run by the system administrator. It uses public APIs to communicate with Cloud Director, NSX-T and vCenter Server to perform the migrations.

The environment must be prepared is such way that there exists NSX-T backed PVDC in the same vCenter Server as the source NSX-V PVDC and that their external networks are at the infrastructure level equivalent as existing external IP addresses are seamlessly migrated as well.

The service provider defines which source Org VDC (NSX-V backed) is going to be migrated and what is the target Provider VDC (NSX-T backed)

The service provider must prepare dedicated NSX-T Edge Cluster whose sole purpose is to perform Layer-2 bridging of source and destination Org VDC networks. This Edge Cluster needs one node for each migrated network and must be deployed in the NSX-V prepared cluster as it will perform VXLAN port group to NSX-T Overlay (Geneve) Logical Segment bridging.

When the tool is started, it will first discover the source Org VDC feature set and assess if there are any incompatible (unsupported) features. If so, the migration will be halted.

Then it will create the target Org VDC and start cloning the network topology, establish bridging, disconnect target networks and run basic network checks to see if the bridges work properly. If not then roll-back is performed (bridges and target Org VDC are destroyed).

In the next step the north / south networking flow will be reconfigured to flow through the target Org VDC. This is done by disconnecting the source networks from the gateway and reconnecting the target ones. During this step brief N/S network disruption is expected. Also notice that the source Org VDC Edge GW needs to be connected temporarily to a dummy network as NSX-V requires at least one connected interface on the Edge at all times.

Each vApp is then vMotioned from the source Org VDC to the target one. As this is live vMotion no significant network/compute disruption is expected.

Once the provider verifies the correct functionality of the target VDC she can manually trigger the cleanup step that migrates source catalogs, destroys bridges and the source Org VDC and renames the target Org VDC.

Rinse and repeat for the other Org VDCs.

Please make sure you read the release notes and user guide for the list of supported solutions and features. The tool will rapidly evolve – short roadmap already includes pre-validation and roll-back features. You are also encouraged to provide early feedback to help VMware decide how the tool should evolve.

Intro

VMware Cloud Director relies on NSX network virtualization platform to provide on-demand creation and management of networks and networking services. NSX for vSphere has been supported for long time and vCloud Director allows most of its feature to be used by its tenants. However as VMware slowly shifts away from NSX for vSphere and pushes forward modern, fully rewritten NSX-T networking platform, I want to focus in this article on its integration with vCloud Director.

History

Let me start with highlighting that NSX-T is evolving very quickly. It means each release (now at version 3.0) adds major new functionality. Contrast that with NSX-V which is essentially feature complete in a sense that no major functionality change is happening there. The fast pace of NSX-T development is a challenge for any cloud management platforms as they have to play the catch up game.

The first release of vCloud Director that supported NSX-T was 9.5. It supported only NSX-T version 2.3 and the integration was very basic. All vCloud Director could do was to import NSX-T overlay logical segments (virtual networks) created manually by system administrator. These networks were imported into a specific tenant Org VDC as Org VDC networks.

The next version of vCloud Director – 9.7 supported only NSX-T 2.4 and from the feature perspective not much had changed. You could still only import networks. Under the hood the integration however used completely new set of NSX-T policy based APIs and there were some minor UI improvements in registering NSX-T Manager.

vCloud Director version 10 for the first time introduced on-demand creation of NSX-T based networks and network services. NSX-T version 2.5 was required.

The latest Cloud Director version 10.1 is extending NSX-T support with new features.

Note: Cloud Director 10.1.0 does not support NSX-T 3.0. That support will come in the next patch release (10.1.1).

NSX-T Primer

While I do not want to go too deep into the actual NSX-T architecture I fully expect that not all readers of this blog are fully familiar with NSX-T and how it differs from NSX-V. Let me quickly highlight major points that are relevant for topic of this blog post.

NSX-T is vCenter Server independent, which means it scales independently from vCenter domain. NSX-T essentially communicates with ESXi hosts directly (they are called host transport nodes). The hosts must be prepared with NSX-T vibs that are incompatible with NSX-V which means a particular host cannot be used by NSX-V and NSX-T at the same time.

Overlay virtual networks use Geneve encapsulation protocol which is incompatible with VXLAN. The concept of Controller cluster that keeps state and transport zone is very similar to NSX-V. The independence from VC mentioned in the previous point means vSphere distributed switch cannot be used, instead NSX-T brings its own N-VDS switch. It also means that there is concept of underlay (VLAN) networks managed by NSX-T. All overlay and underlay networks managed by NSX-T are called logical segments.

Networking services (such as routing, NATing, firewalling, DNS, DHCP, VPN, load balancing) are provided by Tier-0 or Tier-1 Gateways that are functionally similar to NSX-V ESGs but are not instantiated in dedicated VMs. Instead they are services running on shared Edge Cluster. The meaning of Edge Cluster is very different from the usage in NSX-V context. Edge Cluster is not a vSphere cluster, instead it is cluster of Edge Transport Nodes where each Edge Node is VM or bare metal host.

While T0 and T1 Gateways are similar they are not identical, and each has specific purpose or set of services it can offer. Distributed routing is implicitly provided by the platform unless a stateful networking service requires routing through single point. T1 GWs are usually connected to single T0 GW and that connection is managed automatically by NSX-T.

Typically you would have one or small number of T0 GWs in ECMP mode providing North-south routing (concept of Provider Edge) and large number of T1 GWs connected to T0 GW, each for a different tenant to provide tenant networking (concept of Tenant Edge).

VMware Cloud Director Integration

As mentioned above since NSX-T is not vCenter Server dependent, it is attached to Cloud Director independently from VC.

(Geneve) network pool creation is the same as with VXLAN – you provide mapping to an existing NSX-T overlay transport zone.

Now you can create Provider VDC (PVDC) which is as usual mapped to a vSphere cluster or resource pool. A particular cluster used by PVDC must be prepared for NSX-V or NSX-T and all clusters must share the same NSX flavor. It means you cannot mix NSX-V clusters with NSX-T in the same PVDC. However you can easily share NSX-V and NSX-T in the same vCenter Server, you will then just have to create multiple PVDCs. Although NSX-T can span VCs, PVDC cannot – that limitation still remains. When creating NSX-T backed PVDC you will have to specify the Geneve Network Pool created in the previous step.

Within PVDC you can start creating Org VDCs for your tenants – no difference there.

Org VDCs without routable networks are not very useful. To remedy this we must create external networks and Org VDC Edge Gateways. Here the concept quite differs from NSX-V. Although you could deploy provider ECMP Edges with NSX-V as well (and I described here how to do so), it is mandatory with NSX-T. You will have to pre-create T0 GW in NSX-T Manager (ECMP active – active is recommended). This T0 GW will provide external networking access for your tenants and should be routable from the internet. Instead of just importing external network port group how you would do with NSX-V you will import the whole T0 GW in Cloud Director.

During the import you will also have to specify IP subnets and pools that the T0 GW can use for IP sub-allocation to tenants.

Once the external network exist you can create tenant Org VDC Edge Gateways. The service provider can pick specific existing NSX-T Edge Cluster for their placement.

T1 GWs are always deployed in Active x Standby configuration, the placement of active node is automated by NSX-T. The router interlink between T0 and T1 GWs is also created automatically by NSX-T. It is possible to disconnect Org VDC Edge GW from Tier-0 GW (this is for example used in NSX-V to NSX-T migration scenario).

During the Org VDC Edge Gateway the service providers also allocates range of IPs from the external network. Whereas with NSX-V these would actually be assigned to the Org VDC Edge Gateway uplink, this is not the case with NSX-T. Once they are actually used in a specific T1 NAT rule, NSX-T will automatically create static route on the T0 GW and start routing to the correct T1 GW.

Tenant Networks

There are four major types of NSX-T based Org VDC networks and three of them are available to be created via UI:

Isolated: Layer 2 segment not connected to T1 GW. DHCP service is not available on this network (contrary to NSX-V implementation).

Routed: Network that is connected to T1 GW. The default is NAT-routed which means its subnet is not announced to upstream T0 GW and only way to route to reach it from outside is to use DNAT rule on T1 GW from a allocated external IP address.
Cloud Director version 10.1 introduces fully routed network more on it below.

Imported: Existing NSX-T overlay logical segment can be imported (same as in VCD 9.7 or 9.5). Its routing/external connectivity must be managed outside of vCloud Director.

In OpenAPI (POST /1.0.0/OrgVdcNetwork) you will find one more network type: DIRECT_UPLINK. This is for a specific NFV use case. Such network is connected directly to T0 GW with external interface. Note this feature is not officially supported!

Note that only Isolated and routed networks can be created by tenants.

In direct connect use case it is desirable to announce routed Org VDC networks upstream so workloads are reachable directly without any NAT. This is possible in Cloud Director version 10.1, but requires dedicated Tier-0 GW for the particular tenant. The provider must create new Tier-0, connect it to tenant’s particular direct connect transit VLAN and then when deploying Org VDC Edge GW select Dedicate External Network switch.

Cloud Director will make sure that dedicated External Network Tier-0 GW is not accessible to any other Org VDC Edge Gateway.

Tenant can then configure on its Org VDC Edge GW BGP routing, which is in fact set by Cloud Director on the dedicated Tier-0 GW (while Tier-0 to Tier-1 routes are auto-plumbed by NSX).

Tenant Networking Services

Currently the following T1 GW networking services are available to tenants:

Firewall (with IP Sets and Security Groups based on network objects)

NAT

DHCP (without binding and relay)

DNS forwarding

IPSec VPN: Policy based with pre shared key is supported.

All other services are currently not supported. This might be due to NSX-T not having them implemented yet, or Cloud Director not catching up yet. Expect big progress here with each new Cloud Director and NSX-T release.

Networking API

All NSX-T related features are available in the Cloud Director OpenAPI (CloudAPI). The pass through API approach that you might be familiar with from the Advanced Networking NSX-V implementation is not used!

Feature Comparison

I have summarized all Cloud Director networking features in the following table for quick comparison between NSX-V and NSX-T.

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Some time ago I blogged about how I automate acquisition of Let’s Encrypt Certificates for my lab (NSX + vCloud Director) with PowerShell. The old script no longer works due to some changes on Let’s Encrypt side therefore the need for part 2.

To quickly summarize my situation. My lab consists of vCloud Director with multiple cells fronted by NSX-V Load Balancer. I need public certificate for vCloud Director which is uploaded to the NSX-V Load Balancer (that does L7 SSL termination) and to vCloud Director public addresses.

Prerequisites:

Web server on the domain your are getting the certificate for. It is necessary for the DNS challenge that proves you own the domain you are requesting the certificate for. I am using IIS on the machine I trigger the script from and supply the root folder where the challenge file needs to be placed.

NSX-V API access information – needed to replace the certificate on the NSX-Edge

Details about the load balancer (on which Edge it is running and what is the LB application profile of vCloud Director)

vCloud Director API access information – needed to upload new certificate and the full chain to vCloud Director public addresses.

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Intro

vCloud Director relies on NSX network virtualization platform to provide on-demand creation and management of networks and networking services. NSX for vSphere has been supported for long time and vCloud Director allows most of its feature to be used by its tenants. However as VMware slowly shifts away from NSX for vSphere and pushes forward modern, fully rewritten NSX-T networking platform, I want to focus in this article on its integration with vCloud Director.

History

Let me start with highlighting that NSX-T is evolving very quickly. It means each release (now at version 2.5) adds major new functionality. Contrast that with NSX-V which is essentially feature complete in a sense that no major functionality change is happening there. The fast pace of NSX-T development is a challenge for any cloud management platforms as they have to play the catch up game.

The first release of vCloud Director that supported NSX-T was 9.5. It supported only NSX-T version 2.3 and the integration was very basic. All vCloud Director could do was to import NSX-T overlay logical segments (virtual networks) created manually by system administrator. These networks were imported into a specific tenant Org VDC as Org VDC networks.

The next version of vCloud Director – 9.7 supported only NSX-T 2.4 and from the feature perspective not much had changed. You could still only import networks. Under the hood the integration however used completely new set of NSX-T policy based APIs and there were some minor UI improvements in registering NSX-T Manager.

The current vCloud Director version 10 for the first time brings on-demand creation of NSX-T based networks and network services. NSX-T version 2.5 is required.

NSX-T Primer

While I do not want to go too deep into the actual NSX-T architecture I fully expect that not all readers of this blog are fully familiar with NSX-T and how it differs from NSX-V. Let me quickly highlight major points that are relevant for topic of this blog post.

NSX-T is vCenter Server independent, which means it scales independently from vCenter domain. NSX-T essentially communicates with ESXi hosts directly (they are called host transport nodes). The hosts must be prepared with NSX-T vibs that are incompatible with NSX-V which means a particular host cannot be used by NSX-V and NSX-T at the same time.

Overlay virtual networks use Geneve encapsulation protocol which is incompatible with VXLAN. The concept of Controller cluster that keeps state and transport zone is very similar to NSX-V. The independence from VC mentioned in the previous point means vSphere distributed switch cannot be used, instead NSX-T brings its own N-VDS switch. It also means that there is concept of underlay (VLAN) networks managed by NSX-T. All overlay and underlay networks managed by NSX-T are called logical segments.

Networking services (such as routing, NATing, firewalling, DNS, DHCP, VPN, load balancing) are provided by Tier-0 or Tier-1 Gateways that are functionally similar to NSX-V ESGs but are not instantiated in dedicated VMs. Instead they are services running on shared Edge Cluster. The meaning of Edge Cluster is very different from the usage in NSX-V context. Edge Cluster is not a vSphere cluster, instead it is cluster of Edge Transport Nodes where each Edge Node is VM or bare metal host.

While T0 and T1 Gateways are similar they are not identical, and each has specific purpose or set of services it can offer. Distributed routing is implicitly provided by the platform unless a stateful networking service requires routing through single point. T1 GWs are usually connected to single T0 GW and that connection is managed automatically by NSX-T.

Typically you would have one or small number of T0 GWs in ECMP mode providing North-south routing (concept of Provider Edge) and large number of T1 GWs connected to T0 GW, each for a different tenant to provide tenant networking (concept of Tenant Edge).

vCloud Director Integration

As mentioned above since NSX-T is not vCenter Server dependent, it is attached to vCloud Director independently from VC.

(Geneve) network pool creation is the same as with VXLAN – you provide mapping to an existing NSX-T overlay transport zone.

‘Now you can create Provider VDC (PVDC) which is as usual mapped to a vSphere cluster or resource pool. A particular cluster used by PVDC must be prepared for NSX-V or NSX-T and all clusters must share the same NSX flavor. It means you cannot mix NSX-V clusters with NSX-T in the same PVDC. However you can easily share NSX-V and NSX-T in the same vCenter Server, you will then just have to create multiple PVDCs. Although NSX-T can span VCs, PVDC cannot – that limitation still remains. When creating NSX-T backed PVDC you will have to specify the Geneve Network Pool created in the previous step.

Within PVDC you can start creating Org VDCs for your tenants – no difference there.

Org VDCs without routable networks are not very useful. To remedy this we must create external networks and Org VDC Edge Gateways. Here the concept quite differs from NSX-V. Although you could deploy provider ECMP Edges with NSX-V as well (and I described here how to do so), it is mandatory with NSX-T. You will have to pre-create T0 GW in NSX-T Manager (ECMP active – active is recommended). This T0 GW will provide external networking access for your tenants and should be routable from the internet. Instead of just importing external network port group how you would do with NSX-V you will import the whole T0 GW in vCloud Director.

During the import you will also have to specify IP subnets and pools that the T0 GW can use for IP sub-allocation to tenants.

Once the external network exist you can create tenant Org VDC Edge Gateways. These will be T1 GWs instantiations into the same NSX-T Edge Cluster as the T0 GW they connect to. Currently you cannot chose different NSX-T Edge Cluster for their placement. T1 GWs are always deployed in Active x Standby configuration, the placement of active node is automated by NSX-T. The router interlink between T0 and T1 GWs is also created automatically by NSX-T.

During the Org VDC Edge Gateway the service providers also sub-allocates range of IPs from the external network. Whereas with NSX-V these would actually be assigned to the Org VDC Edge Gateway uplink, this is not the case with NSX-T. Once they are actually used in a specific T1 NAT rule, NSX-T will automatically create static route on the T0 GW and start routing to the correct T1 GW.

Tenant Networks

There are four types of NSX-T based Org VDC networks and three of them are available to be created via UI:

Isolated: Layer 2 segment not connected to T1 GW. DHCP service is not available on this network (contrary to NSX-V implementation).

Routed: Network that is connected to T1 GW. Note however that its subnet is not announced to upstream T0 GW which means only way to route to it is to use NAT.

Imported: Existing NSX-T overlay logical segment can be imported (same as in VCD 9.7 or 9.5). Its routing/external connectivity must be managed outside of vCloud Director.

In OpenAPI (POST /1.0.0/OrgVdcNetwork) you will find one more network type: DIRECT_UPLINK. This is for a specific NFV use case. Such network is connected directly to T0 GW with external interface. Note this feature is not officially supported!

Note that only Isolated and NAT-routed networks can be created by tenants.

As you can see it is not possible today to create routed advertised Org VDC network (for example for direct connect use case when tenant wants to route from on-prem networks to the cloud without using NAT). These routed networks would require dedicated T0 GW for each tenant which would not scale well but might be possible in the future with VRF support on T0 GWs.

Tenant Networking Services

Currently the following T1 GW networking services are available to tenants:

Firewall

NAT

DHCP (without binding and relay)

DNS forwarding

IPSec VPN: No UI, OpenAPI only. Policy and route based with pre share key is supported. (Thanks Abhi for the correction).

All other services are currently not supported. This might be due to NSX-T not having them implemented yet, or vCloud Director not catching up yet. Expect big progress here with each new vCloud Director and NSX-T release.

Networking API

All NSX-T related features are available in the vCloud Director OpenAPI (CloudAPI). The pass through API approach that you might be familiar with from the Advanced Networking NSX-V implementation is not used!

Feature Comparison

I have summarized all vCloud Director networking features in the following table for quick comparison between NSX-V and NSX-T.

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I just have had a chance for the first time to set up vCloud Director installation that was fronted by NSX-T based load balancer (version 2.4.1). In the past I have blogged how to load balance vCloud Director cells with NSX-V:

NSX-T differs quite a lot from NSX-V therefore the need for this article. The load balancer instance is deployed into the NSX-T Edge Cluster which is a set of virtual or physical NSX-T Edge Nodes. There are also strict sizing guidelines related to the size and number of LB and size of Edge Nodes – see the official docs.

Certificates

Import your VCD public cert in the NSX Manager UI: System > Certificates > Import Certificate. You will need to provide name, full certificate chain, private key and set is as Service Certificate. If it is signed by Enterprise CA you will also before that import the CA cert.

Profiles

Application Profile

Here in the UI we can set only Request Header Size and Request Body Size. Set both to 65535 maximum (65535 for header size and at least 52428800 for body size as ISO/OVA uploads use 50 MB chunks). We will later use API to also configure Response Header Size.

Persistence and SSL Profiles

I will reuse existing default-source-ip-lb-persistence-profile and default-balanced-client-ssl-profile.

Server Pools

Networking > Load Balancing > Server Pools > Add Server Pool

Algorithm: Least Connection

Active Monitor: picked the one created before

Select members: Enter individual members (do not enter port as we will reuse the pool for multiple ports)

Virtual Servers

We will add two virtual servers. One for UI/API and another for VM Remote Console connections. For both I have picked the same IP address from the cell logical segment. Ports will be different (443 vs 8443).

vCloud Console

Add virtual server: L4 TCP

Ports: 8443

Ignore Load Balancer placement for now

Server Pool: the one we created before

Application Profile: default-tcp-lb-app-profile

Persistence: disabled

Load Balancer

Now we can create load balancer instance and associate the virtual servers with it. Create the LB instance on the Tier 1 Gateway which routes to your VCD cell network. Make sure the Tier 1 Gateway runs on an Edge node with the proper size (see the doc link before).

Networking > Load Balancing > Load Balancers > Add Load Balancer

Size: small

Tier 1 Gateway

Add Virtual Servers: add the 2 virtual servers created in the previous step

Now we have the load balancer up and running you should get all green in the status column. We are not done yet though.

Firstly we need to increase the response header size as vCloud Director Open API sends huge headers with links. Without this, you would get H5 UI errors (Nginx 502 Bad Gateway) and some API calls would fail. This can be currently done only with NSX Policy API. Fire up Postman or Curl and do GET and then PUT on the following URI:

NSX-manager/policy/api/v1/infra/lb-app-profiles/<profile-name>

in the payload change the response_header_size to at least 1024050000 bytes.

And finally we will need to set up NAT so our load balanced virtual servers are available both from the outside world (on Tier-0 Gateway) as well from the internal networks. This is quite network topology specific, but do not forget the cells itself must properly connect to the public (load balanced) URL configured in vCloud Director public addresses.